One of Korean independent cinema's quietest and most distinctive voices receives its first concentrated spotlight, with all five films screening at Muju's "Next Cineaste" retrospective

Photo of Son Koo-yong (provided by Muju Film Festival)

One of Korean independent cinema's quietest and most distinctive voices is receiving its first concentrated spotlight. The 14th Muju Mountain Film Festival (June 4–8, Muju, North Jeolla Province) has selected director Sohn Koo-yong as this year's "Next Cinéaste," presenting all five of his short and feature films in a dedicated retrospective. For a filmmaker whose work has traveled exclusively through festivals — Rotterdam, Yamagata, Busan — without a single commercial theatrical release, this marks the most expansive domestic platform his cinema has ever occupied.

Sohn Koo-yong builds his films by stripping them down: no narrative, no dialogue, and in at least one case, no sound. What fills that space instead are extended fixed-camera observations of Seoul's Segeomjeong neighborhood and the grounds of Jongno's Jeongdok Library, classical poetry rendered in handwritten script, and drawings the director himself overlays onto the image. He calls this "discovery" — a camera posture that withdraws human intervention as far as possible in order to encounter what is already there.

The five films screening at Muju trace the full arc of that aesthetic. His debut short A Walk (2017, 20 min.) places two figures — a man who draws, a woman who photographs — on parallel walks through a small Seoul neighborhood, binding them in a structure of repetition and symmetry. The film was selected for the International Medium-Length and Short Film Competition at Visions du Réel in Switzerland. Winter in Seoul (2018, 25 min.) loosely adapts Kim Seung-ok's novella Seoul, Winter of 1964, interweaving a man who retreats to a motel to write with the monochrome rhythms of the city's night. It marked Sohn's first invitation to Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival's New Asian Currents section.

His debut feature Afternoon Landscape (2020, 73 min.) follows a woman with a camera drifting through the midday city, with children's poetry and chalk drawings serving as intertitles — a graduate thesis film from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago that earned a return invitation to Yamagata. Night Walk (2023, 65 min.) narrows further still: silent, monochrome, fixed shots of Segeomjeong at night, overlaid with Joseon Dynasty poems in the director's own hand. The film premiered in the Harbour section of the International Film Festival Rotterdam and received the Special Documentary Award at the Jeonju International Film Festival. The most recent work, At the Park (2024, 86 min.), adapts poet Oh Kyu-won's Breathing of the Garden into an 86-minute study of a public park at 2 p.m. — a woman reading on a bench, a man wandering nearby, a fountain, birds, a cat, a butterfly — capturing the micro-movements of a space that appears still. The film screened in the Documentary Competition of the Wide Angle section at the 2024 Busan International Film Festival. 

All five films will loop daily in the underground screening gallery of the Muju Sangsang Bandi Forest venue throughout the festival run. Two round-table discussions with the director and critics are scheduled. A highlight among the ancillary events is a special live-score screening of Night Walk — the otherwise silent film — accompanied by electronic musician Kirara. An exhibition of Sohn's photographic work, Photography and Film: The Receding Camera, will run concurrently in the venue lobby.

Sohn Koo-yong's cinematic lineage traces back to Jacques Tati, Abbas Kiarostami, and Robert Bresson, but the mode he ultimately pursues is closer to poetry than to cinema as conventionally understood. His approach to extended static imagery resonates with the American landscape film tradition of James Benning and Peter Hutton — a connection that critics at Rotterdam noted explicitly. The Muju Mountain Film Festival's "Next Cinéaste" program focuses specifically on emerging directors who push the boundaries of Korean film aesthetics, and Sohn's selection signals domestic recognition of a body of work that has, until now, found its most consistent audience abroad. For international programmers and distributors, whose primary point of contact with his films has been festival screenings, this retrospective offers the most complete picture of his work to date.

Sources

• Cine21, "Films, Exhibitions, Music: Three Ways to Experience the Muju Mountain Film Festival", 2026.06.11

• Cine21, "The Key Is Ultimately the Camera — Meeting Sohn Koo-yong, Next Cinéaste at the Muju Mountain Film Festival (Part 1)", 2026.06.11

• Cine21, "Born Anew Each Day — Meeting Sohn Koo-yong, Next Cinéaste at the Muju Mountain Film Festival (Part 2)", 2026.06.11

• Cine21, "Walking Through Sohn Koo-yong's World — Five Films Screening at the 14th Muju Mountain Film Festival", 2026.06.11